Installation view of "Bosco Sodi: Solo Para Revivir" at Kasmin, New York.
Photo: Courtesy Kasmin
From New York to Los Angeles, 8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in October
From Derrick Adams's Gagosian debut to Anne Buckwalter’s intimate paintings and drawings of Pennsylvania Dutch style interiors at Rachel Uffner
Rounding up the most fascinating solo gallery shows in America each month, Galerie journeyed from New York, where Rachel Uffner is presenting Anne Buckwalter’s intimate paintings and drawings of Pennsylvania Dutch style interiors oddly peppered with nudes and sex toys, to Los Angeles, where Derrick Adams is making his Gagosian debut with colorful large-scale canvases capturing Black people sharing communal experiences and celebrating moments of rest and play. These are the not-to-be-missed shows in October.
Anne Buckwalter, Red Right Hand, (2023). Photo: JSP Art Photography; Courtesy Rachel Uffner
1. Anne Buckwalter at Rachel Uffner, New York
Inspired by folk art traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where she spent her childhood, Anne Buckwalter makes similar flattened depictions of domestic interiors and pointed arrangements of personal objects in her realistic paintings and works on paper. Mixing hex signs, quilt patterns and homegrown crafts with nudes reflected in mirrors and captured on artworks displayed on the walls or seen on a screen, Buckwalter adds an erotic edge to her otherwise decorative environments.
Buckwalter’s voyeuristic pictograms of charmingly organized rooms remarkably reveal intimate moments in the bedroom, embarrassing pictures on computers and intimate objects left visible in trash baskets. The Maine-based artist’s exhibition “Reins on a Rocking Horse” presents 22 small to medium-scale gouache on panel paintings and more than a dozen works on paper. Among our favorites is Red Right Hand, which highlights a mirror reflecting the rear-side of a standing nude with a red hand-mark, suggesting the figure had just been slapped on the buttocks. With the red of the wound matching the color of the roses on the wallpaper, the act seems more romantic than punishing, yet the binoculars on the floor mischievously bring that issue into doubt.
Through November 4
Bony Ramirez, Fiera: Mother of Pearl, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch
2. Bony Ramirez at Jeffrey Deitch, New York
Exploring memories of his Caribbean roots, Bony Ramirez—who currently lives in Harlem and has a studio in Jersey City—immigrated with his family from the Dominican Republic when he was just 13 years old, but his recollections of his homeland and former life there still ring strong. A self-taught artist with a background in construction, Ramirez utilizes inventive ways of working when making his ongoing series of symbolic paintings and sculptures. Cleverly employing Surrealist-inspired collage and assemblage techniques, he poetically fuses humans with animals and marvelously merges objects and body parts to delightfully dynamic ends.
His “TROPICAL APEX” exhibition transforms the gallery into a blood-red environment that offers a tactile feeling of the Caribbean with giant bull sculptures, gravel and shell covered lawns, startlingly altered ceramics and a cock-fighting ring. Confronting issues of migration and colonialism, Ramirez makes his paintings by imaginatively rendering figures with oil stick, acrylic and colored pencils on paper cutouts mounted on wallpaper and wood panels and his bull sculptures by attaching the beasts’ taxidermy busts to painted wood structures, displaying shells. At the center of the show, his circular painting Fiera: Mother of Pearl conveys the spirit of the islands, and perhaps the artist, as a half-human wild beast buoyantly emerges from an oyster shell, surrounded by precious pearls.
Through October 21
Laure Prouvost, The Octopus Body - You Are Mine, (2023). Photo: © Laure Prouvost; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
3. Laure Prouvost at Lisson Gallery, New York
A French artist living and working in Brussels, Laure Prouvost studied art at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths College in London, which eventually led her to receiving the 2013 Turner Prize, the UK’s most coveted art award. The multidisciplinary artist later represented her French homeland in the 2019 Venice Biennale, where she exhibited her film of a road trip on horseback and an installation of a surreal, liquid and tentacular universe, which challenged the concept of a fluid, globalized world.
In her sprawling “Stranded By Your Side” exhibition, Prouvost casts a giant bronze sculpture of a beached octopus on a sandy shore as the protagonist in a psychological setting. Symbolic of the blurry boundary between emotion and thought, the tentacled octopus, which thinks by feeling and feels by thinking, is the bearer of life—mixing the artist’s exploration of motherhood with her concerns for our ecological vitality. Paintings from her new “Octopus Body” series surround the symbolic creature, with The Octopus Body – You Are Mine showing marine life embracing human breasts while other canvases offer images of the octopus interacting with a baby. Bringing the poetic narrative into a more realistic realm, Prouvost presents a film in a womblike space in the gallery that features three women nurturing one another and a baby (the artist’s newborn) with marine animals to bring us back to the sensations of early life.
Through October 14
Nicolas Party, Triptych with Mountains, (2023). Photo: Adam Reich; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
4. Nicolas Party at Hauser & Wirth, New York
A Swiss-born artist based in New York and Brussels, Nicolas Party is celebrated for his color-saturated figurative paintings, sculptures and site-specific murals—bewitchingly depicting wistful portraits of androgynous people, dreamy landscapes and still lives of everyday objects, all stripped of extraneous details. A master of painting with soft pastels on linen and on walls, the artist continues to experiment, adding the lost art of painting portaits on copper, which was popular with Flemish Old Masters, that he places on hand-painted faux-marble plinths.
Presenting his first solo show at the gallery’s New York flagship since joining the international powerhouse in 2019, Party turns the ground floor space into a natural paradise with waterfalls, swamps, forests, people and animals—a wonderland that’s full of possibilities yet fraught with danger. In his “Swamp” exhibition, a portrait of a baby (the artist recently became a father) is juxtaposed with a mural of a forest engulfed in flames while monochromatic paintings of sublime mountain ranges and a gushing waterfall compete with a massive mural and a triptych of tree-filled swamps. His Triptych with Mountains captures a sage-like figure gazing at the viewer from an idyllic setting, yet his Triptych with Red Forest (both are oil on copper paintings with plinths) shows a less virtuous figure before a world on fire. Conceptually philosophical, Party’s pictures make us marvel at their making as we also consider his concerns.
Through October 21
Bosco Sodi, Untitled, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Kasmin
5. Bosco Sodi at Kasmin, New York
Internationally acclaimed for paintings, sculptures and installations using such natural materials as wood, rocks and clay, Bosco Sodi makes everything by hand, which is no small feat when you are exhibiting with eleven different galleries worldwide and having up to nine solo shows a year. And while his work is often a standout at major art fairs, it’s best experienced in his one-person exhibitions, like “Solo Para Revivir” at the gallery, where his varied ways of working come together to make a “gesamtkunstwerk,” which roughly translates from German as total work of art.
The Mexican artist’s gestural paintings made with a mixture of sawdust, pigment and glue on wood panels or by painting a monochromatic circle each day on recycled chili sacks yield minimalistic abstractions, which are cracked like the parched earth or humble and spiritual, like Arte Povera and Gutai Art—two direct influences, along with the Tachisme of Antoni Tàpies, on the artist. Sodi utilizes the colors black, red, purple, and green in the show’s paintings to reference their historical significances while employing Oaxacan clay in his three large sculptural spheres. Using the sculptures as the metaphoric glue that ties the paintings together in the main gallery space, Sodi gives each one a life of its own, with one being solid, another glazed in gold, and the last one broken with a seedling sprouting from it—suggesting a continuous revival of existence from the Earth.
Through October 21
Jon Young, Windblown, (2022). Photo: Courtesy Rusha & Co.
6. Jon Young at Rusha & Co., Los Angeles
A tribal member of the Catawba Indian Nation, Jon Young explores the development of language and signage in the American West through his uniquely crafted wood, sand and fabric sculptures. Drawing upon symbols of the mythological West as they relate to his Native American heritage and his journey, which has been informed by his early life as a nomadic kid in a military household and his later experience of living in the Mojave Desert with snakes, scorpions and horses, the artist brings the otherworldly into the gallery realm.
Hand-built by utilizing upholsters’ techniques for constructing padded furniture with iridescent fabric, batting and wood, Young skillfully shapes sculptural reliefs with geometric and figurative forms from industrial materials. Creating a giant cactus, a pair of horses, a rooster, several insects and fires for his “One Eye Closed” exhibition, Young brings the Wild West that we know from cartoons and films into perspective by adding spiritual meaning to cliched subject matter. Flipping the script on “How the West Was Won,” his colorful rooster draws a line in the sand, scorpions keep moving to avoid becoming targets, horses stay in blind spots to keep from being captured and the aptly titled Windblown cactus stands tall in sand from the Catawba River in South Carolina.
Through November 4
Shara Hughes, Fool Me Once, (2023). Photo: Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery
7. Shara Hughes at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
An abstract artist primarily known for her vibrantly painted imaginary landscapes, Shara Hughes has been exhibiting her expressive artworks since the mid-00s, but her big break came when she showed her colorful canvases in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where her art was critically acclaimed. Since that time, international museum and gallery shows have followed, but the exhibition “Light the Dark” is the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles. Presenting psychologically charged, invented landscapes inspired by such modernist movements as Fauvism, Art Nouveau and German Expressionism, her lush, vibrant canvases evoke fairy tale settings.
The seventeen large-scale paintings on view in the show shift between moments of light and dark, day and night. One of the gallery’s spaces is dedicated to light paintings and another to dark ones. A third, transitional room offers two large-scale works in a horizontal format to provide a bridge between the neighboring groupings. Sunrises and sunsets through forests and fields and over rivers and lakes provide subject matter for the Brooklyn-based artist’s expresive brushwork and lively palette, with paintings like Fool Me Once sucking us into its sensual realm and then keeping our eyes, thoughts and feelings enchantingly entangled in that dynamic domain.
Through October 21
Derrick Adams, Lookie Loos, (2023). Photo: New Document; Courtesy Gagosian
8. Derrick Adams at Gagosian, Beverly Hills
Widely celebrated for his Floaters series of paintings and prints portraying Black people in various states of rest and play, Derrick Adams makes his Gagosian solo show debut with jubilant paintings capturing real lived experiences, ranging from moments of lighthearted leisure to recollections of past people and places resonating with joy. Painted in a collage manner with flat, geometric planes of muted colors and patterned fabrics that come together to form playfully Cubistic figures, objects and scenarios, the paintings expose the festive side of Black social life, one that’s commonly shared with family and friends.
Offering nearly a dozen new paintings and a colorful sculptural bench in the shape of a giant popsicle, his Come as You Are exhibition recreates moments from a masquerade party, the circus, a concert, a backyard barbeque and a pool party. The painting Lookie Loos presents the dazzling new trends on display in the window of a Black beauty salon, while Happy Place captures the artist floating in a tub with a thought balloon reminding him to “Stay Focused” and All Eyes on Me seems to portray Adams stepping into his new role as a Gagosian artist, with anticipation of the whole world scrutinizing both the art and the person making it.
Through October 28
Cover: Installation view of "Bosco Sodi: Solo Para Revivir" at Kasmin, New York.
Photo: Courtesy Kasmin
